That's not the only way to interpret that passage (it's not how I interpreted the passage, in any case). There's no contradiction in saying "pop music is also popular and so our station also has programs that play pop music". In fact, I took the author as meaning "there is some classical music that people only play b/c it's avant garde or political, &c, but the subset of classical music that we happen to play is what people request". And I'm not even sure that's a criticism of those other subgenres of classical music – more an observation on the general population's preferences and the influence of funding on the programming decisions of radio stations.

edit: to be clear, I vigorously agree with everything else you wrote in your first comment! I just want to assume good faith for the author of the featured piece.